Edvard Munch by Himself:
Royal Academy of Arts

Feature: James Haddrell

FEW ARTISTS have documented their own life as rigorously as the
Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.

From the time he enrolled at the Royal School of Drawing in
Kristiania (now Oslo) in 1881 to the time of his death in 1944
he constantly painted himself, but with the exception of his very
earliest works, painted during his short-lived membership of the
Naturalist movement, Munch’s portraits are far more than
exercises in painting from life – they are paintings of
the experience of life.

The three self-portraits that open the exhibition, painted between
1882 and 1886, serve to illustrate the artist’s early rejection
of naturalism. While the first concentrates on the surface of
the painter’s face, seen as a solid form in three-quarter
profile, by the third portrait Munch has taken to scratching at
the surface of the paint with the sharp end of the brush, hacking
away at his image as life has hacked away at him.

Born in 1863, Munch lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was
just 5 and his sister Sophie nine years later.

In 1889, with the psychological damage he had already suffered
becoming visible in his work, Munch wrote, “no longer shall
interiors be painted with people reading and women knitting. There
shall be living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love”
– a manifesto, if ever there was one, for the prolific career
that was to come.

The first half of the Royal Academy’s
exhibition reveals the first 25 years or so of Munch’s self-portraiture
as a dramatic, often theatrical progression towards complete psychological
breakdown.

In 1895, the artist portrays himself in the large scale Self
Portrait With Cigarette, a naturalist depiction mysteriously
lit from below and surrounded by black, brooding, oppressive shadows.
For the turn of the century’s Golgotha, the artist
is depicted as a naked, crucified Christ figure, pitilessly mocked
by the crowds, before ending up in 1903’s Self Portrait
In Hell.

The early years of the 20th Century also saw Munch obsessing
over the violent ending to his relationship with girlfriend, Tulla
Larsen. When Larsen threatened to commit suicide in response to
Munch’s refusal to marry, the artist shot himself in the
hand.

The resulting Operating Table of 1903, in which the
painter is laid naked on a hospital operating table while a crowd
of observers look on, shows the deeply self-pitying view that
Munch had of the whole affair. The physical injury may have been
limited to a finger of his left hand, but psychologically Munch
was being dissected for the world to express their contempt.

In the years that followed, his relationship
with Larsen was to feature again and again. The violent Death
Of Marat series casts him as the ultimate victim - the French
revolutionary murdered by a woman – with red paint smeared
onto the canvas as if Munch is literally painting in his own blood.

In 1908, at the height of his tortured working and reworking
of this event, Munch suffered a nervous breakdown, and in 1909
returned home to Norway.

Whilst the post-recovery self-portraits can certainly not be
categorised as all happy, the dramatic visions of hell, of vampires,
laughing crowds and female murderers have become a thing of the
past.

The 1915 Self Portrait: Nude With Raised Arm shows Munch
looking up towards the sun, his palette light and pastel dominated,
the artist yearning for absolution from his past. The fires of
hell have been replaced by the rays of the sun, and whilst many
of Munch’s anxieties are still present their depiction has
an older, wiser quality.

In Self Portrait In Bergen, painted while in Bergen
for a major exhibition of his work, Munch sits on a balcony with
his head averted from the bustling crowds below. He may still
see himself as an outsider, and suffer the weight of his own loneliness,
but he is no longer surrounded by the probing, mocking crowds
of his earlier paintings – the world now simply goes by
without him.

It is the lack of Munch’s earlier melodrama that makes
the end of the Royal Academy’s exhibition the most affecting.
In Self Portrait: The Night Wanderer an insomniac Munch confronts
himself, nervous and hesitant in the darkness.

In Self Portrait Between Clock and Bed, one of the
final paintings in the exhibition, Munch stands hunched between
a grandfather clock without hands, a timepiece with no time left,
and the bed in which so many of us eventually die. The victim
of fire and brimstone, of violence and crucifixion has become
the victim of illness, of loneliness, of old-age.

The late works are no longer a theatrical performance, a melodramatic
expression of feeling; they have come to constitute a genuine
confession of that human frailty from which we all suffer –
and therefore an expression of emotion in which it is all too
easy to share.

Early in his career, commenting on the tragedy that had beset
his early life, Munch remarked that ‘illness, madness and
death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle’.

We may not all feel the effects of madness, or the ominous presence
of black angels, but we all age and we all ultimately die.

For that reason Munch’s final works, full of frustration,
frailty and the acceptance of his own mortality, provide the highest
point in his quest to portray ‘people who breathe and feel
and suffer and love’, for in painting the experience of
his own fading life with so much truth, he is really painting
us all.